Almost every parent kisses their child, especially mothers. Kisses get planted on the child’s cheeks, lips, forehead, skin; and the child grows up identifying kisses as a show of love.
Every child wishes to grow in an environment of love, naturally children respond to love. Even a child being brought up by a single parent hopes one day that mum/ dad can find someone to love; we were created not to be alone, we were created in purity to wish others to find true love and for our hearts to be touched when we see people loving. Children find security in a home that shows love. Mum and dad should not just make hate absent, they should make love visibly present.
Especially for the young children, when they see mum and dad kissing they associate that with love, that everything is OK between mum and dad especially in this day and age where families are breaking, affairs entertain us on radio, gossips about failed marriages scare us, tabloids entertain us, wives are beaten up and husbands are despised.
The kiss done in front of the children is not the heavy kind of kissing; but that brief kiss mum gives on daddy’s cheeks, that gentle kiss dad plants on mum’s lips when he says goodbye or when mum does a good thing. When a child sees that the child feels safe.
The first place children should learn and witness romantic love should be from mum and dad, not from soap operas, friends, movies or internet. The first encounter of man-woman love for the child to witness should be at home; only then will the child know of its beauty and meaning and begin to value marriage and family from a tender age. Too many parents shy away from talking about sex and love to their children then complain when their children grow up going astray. The child ends up making mistakes and relations between child and parents become strained. Yet the child had a natural inner curiosity which the parents did not guide and model the right way leaving the child to find other sources for “guidance”
If we want our children to end up in happy marriages it all starts by what we expose them to when they are infants. Expose your child to the real meaning of love and display it clearly at home so that you shape your child’s understanding and perspective, and when corrupt forms of love come, your child will stand strong because the right unshakable foundation was set by you.
Mum and dad, be deliberate. Demonstrate love at home, if you have a dispute, settle it in the bedroom not in front of the children. A scene of mum and dad fighting or having an average form of love, negatively affects the child. But when the child sees mum and dad in love, the house becomes a home and the child grows praying to have such kind of love and marriage; when the child starts dating his/her standards will be high because mum and dad’s love is the benchmark; the child will not shy away from being open to mum and dad about matters of the heart.
Some might argue a simple kiss in front of the children is un African, but African parents just like Western or Asian parents express love through a kiss. Love knows no race, knows no tribe. African brides and grooms after all do kiss on their wedding day in front of the public including children; if that kiss was innocent and honorable on the wedding day, what has changed since the wedding day? If you will not proudly kiss your spouse, who else will you kiss?
Kiss your spouse in front of your child/ children often, not so much for you two, but for the security and the shaping of the child/children’s idea of what love is. Leave a vacuum, and the misleading world will fill it!